‘No.’ I sit back. ‘I’m just a medic.’
She sniffs and nods. ‘Help me stand up?’
‘Be careful.’ I lean down to take her arm. ‘If you do have a concussion—’
In a flash, my arm is twisted and I’m flung off balance, landing face down into the dirt. I roll onto my back, snatching out my knife by reflex, but a small fist knocks it from my grasp. I try to cry out when something slams down on my throat.
It’s the girl’s boot. She stares down at me, her lips curled into a snarl.
‘You won’t kill two of us, carrion.’
As blue and yellow stars start to fill my vision, the wind blows, brushing sand across my face and for a second, less than a second, I feel them.
They are like a creature with a thousand eyes, hungrily tracing every outcome, showing me innumerable realities, too many for my mind to bear.
I am dead in the desert, the child driving the mule away. I throw her off with such force that her head strikes a boulder. I am dead, the wind drying my corpse to leather. I drag her across the sand, me, her, each of us the victor, the victim…
I shoot out an arm and I see every conceivable movement gather around it, a blur of limbs and chaos, impossible to track, until – like a clear signal from static – I see my own hand grab a fistful of dust and fling it into the girl’s face.
She falls back. Before I can get to my feet she lunges again, this time with the knife in her hand. I scramble away, body a mess of adrenalin and not enough air as she attacks in frenzy, aiming to kill.
But they have shown me this path, and as I crash into the dirt mule, I know what to do. I reach behind me, groping for the medkit. Metal meets my fingers and the moment the girl leaps, I strike.
The knife falters two inches from my heart. The girl’s lips twitch in a snarl, before a convulsion shakes her body and she glances down at the syringe protruding from her neck.
‘Y—’ she begins before the knife falls from her grip and she crumples, lifeless, to the ground.
* * *
I don’t allow myself to sit and breathe until the child is restrained and tied as securely as I can manage, even though she won’t wake for hours. In my panic I gave her enough tranquilliser to suppress a grown adult, and there’s a chance that it could kill her.
Her small face twitches as the drug makes its way through her system. Cursing myself, I fetch the canteen of wastewater from the mule. My brain thuds with questions, with the thin air and the ebbing adrenalin and the lingering horror of their presence. Wetting a rag, I begin to wipe the dried blood from her face.
At first, her features appear unremarkable: skin sallow with blood loss, round cheeks, pointed chin. But as I clean the mess away, I see the undeniable evidence of what she is. Although she’s young, thirteen at most, her face is deeply lined. Between the heavy brows and around her mouth are creases usually seen on someone who has lived through years of hardship. Her physique too, is unnatural. She’s lean, but not through malnutrition and labour and ill health, like most on Factus, but sinewy, with hard muscles beneath the skin of her arms and legs.
Some part of me still hopes that I am wrong, that she’s just a poor sick child after all. But when I clean the last of the blood away from her temple, there’s no denying it. There’s the tattoo – the double triangle and three thick lines – proclaiming what she is.
I shove myself away. My own temple throbs, as if the skin there – a faded pink scar now – is reverting to newly seared flesh; as if my hand has only just dropped the hot iron. Covering my face, I try to find some control, try to wrest myself back from the woman I once was, the woman who only a few years ago might have taken up the knife and used it without question.
I close my eyes. The Free Limits are finished. The woman who fought and killed for them is gone. Now, the tally is all that matters and it demands that the child, whoever she is, whatever she is, must live.
Besides, I have a promise to keep.
* * *
I make sure to arrive at the trade post in the twilight, when the winds are picking up and no one cares to look too closely at the shape on the rear of my mule, covered with the tarp. It’s reckless, but there’s no way I’m going to take the child into the settlement until I have some answers. Too much attention. Some bad part of my brain whispers that she might wake and escape on her own and so spare me a decision I don’t know how to make.
The trade post is outside of Redcrop proper, separated from the settlement by fields of sickly-looking century trees and ghostly agave. Townsfolk prefer it this way. It keeps uncertainty out of their lives, along with scratchtooth drifters and wreckers, bandits and scavengers, the desperate and the damned who come trailing suspicion and violence from the Unincorporated Zone.
Redcrop is a faithful, fearful town: they take no risks and brook no questions. Questions lead to uncertainty, uncertainty opens the door to doubt and so, to them.
Different in the cities; there, hundreds of people make thousands of choices, every day. It’s enough to keep them at bay, people reckon, gives them enough to feed on. But out here in the wastes people are few and choices are scarce, and if you let yourself doubt – if you let chance into your life – you’ll shine out like a beacon through time and space and they
